The Cure · Side
Salt Cod, Home-Cured
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
A quiet dish that lets its main ingredient speak: season well and stand aside.
Ingredients
- 1 kg thick cod loin, skin on, pin boned
- 1.5 kg coarse sea salt
Equipment
Sheet pan
The skills inside
Brining & curingThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSoaking dried goods back to life
The words inside
Building the Home & Starting Bar
Allergen screen
Found: fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Lay a 1 cm bed of salt in a perforated tray set over a dish, put the cod on it skin down, and bury it completely in more salt.
- Refrigerate. Each day pour off the brine that has collected and replace the wet salt with dry, because the fish must never sit in its own liquor.
- By day 7 the loin should be stiff, amber at the edge and about half its starting weight. Rack it another 5 days in a cold airy place if you want it board hard.
- To cook with it, rinse the surface salt away and soak in a large bowl of cold water in the fridge for 48 hours, changing the water four times. 600 min
- Poach a sliver to test: it should taste seasoned, not salty. Thin tail pieces need only 24 hours, so soak those separately. 600 min
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Fino or Manzanilla Sherry
- Also Right
- Muscadet or dry Riesling
- From the Taps
- Pilsner
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
Salt-cured fish wants a bone-dry, saline partner: Sherry and Atlantic whites answer the cure without fighting it.
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